Palm Pre

Sprint has released a statement today in regards to the sales figures of the EVO. Apparently they made a mistake when they said the EVO has sold twice as many as the Pre and Instinct combined on their release day. What they meant to say was the EVO sales was “in line” with sales of the aforementioned handsets.

If you love Android but also like the styling of the Palm Pre you can soon have the best of both worlds. Introducing, the upcoming Alcatel OT-980 Android slider phone from a French OHA member and new comer to the Android game.
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For the Android user who wants to go to Walt Disney World and needs to know the wait time for certain attractions in the famous park, TouringPlans.com has a solution. Lines, a mobile website that displays estimates of wait times for every attraction at Walt Disney World.
The folks at TouringPlans have launched in the past products such as Touring Plans and the Crowd Calendar to help the visitors at Walt Disney World to efficiently tour the parks and avoid the crowds. And now, Lines is available for Android as well as for the first and second webOS phones; Palm Pre and Pixi, oh, and the fruit phone too. With this service, they will help you to "Find out how long you'll actually wait in line for every attraction." And not only that but you can also "Get crowd estimates, refurb data, single rider lines, & more."
Now, when you think you are stuck and don't know how long the line is at Space Mountain, or Frontierland, just get your Android phone out and hit http://m.touringplans.com (Lines) in your browser, to unleash the power of this mobile web app. Lines is free to use for a limited time, and you’ll need to subscribe to use Lines during this preview. Is anyone here planning a trip to Florida and especially to WDW, let us know in the comments if this web app worked out for you.
[Via MyPre.com]

If you have seen one of the new Now Network TV Commercials from Sprint/Nextel, then you have notice how different - and better - those are in comparison to the old black and white with Dan Hesse in them. Well, Sprint is now airing one of those nicer Now Network ads with the HTC Hero in it.
This new TV commercial is for the holiday shoppers to see some of the best handsets that Sprint carries. In it you can see the little black pebble; the Palm Pre, the chinless (and better looking, at least in my opinion) HTC Hero and the BlackBerry Tour.
Unfortunately, the Samsung Moment is missing on this commercial, why Sprint did not include the Samsung smartphone is a mystery. But at least is finally releasing commercials for Android devices, and calls the Sprint HTC Hero as a customizable phone with access to thousands of applications.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5hy2jMYFTE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Customization is one of the big draws to open source devices like those running Android. Users can modify and customize their devices to their hearts content. One of the stranger ways to customize phones to me is to try to make them look like other devices.
A theme has been available for Android that mimics the look and feel of the Palm Pre. As it turns out the theme used wallpapers and icons directly from webOS and raised the ire of Palm.

Multitouch support was dropped from the Android platform, and therefore the T-Mobile G1, after Apple requested it not be included. That's the latest rumor, apparently confirmed by an unnamed Android team member, who described the arrangement as an attempt by Google to avoid the IP aggression we've recently seen between Apple and Palm.
While the G1's capacitive touchscreen certainly recognizes multitouch input - as recent hacks have demonstrated - and earlier builds of Android code included what's believed to be Google-written, but subsequently disabled, multitouch support, the functionality did not ship in the released device. At the time, this was generally put down to Google's ambitious launch schedule, promising an Android device by the end of 2008, and that lack of timing meaning that multitouch fell by the wayside. However it now looks as though its omission was purposeful, with Google prioritizing their good working relationship with Apple - and, some might say, common foe in Microsoft - over the handset's eventual capabilities.
The unnamed source also confirmed the rumors that Intel is expending great efforts in supporting Android netbook development, suggesting that the chipset company is keen to be further involved in open-source budget ultraportable hardware. While Intel's specific plans are unknown, the Android team member revealed that there are many different Android-based netbooks - as well as other, non-phone and non-netbook hardware - in development at present.

We are still presumably months away from the launch of what’s hyped to be 2009’s hottest handset, the Palm Pre. The timeframe hasn’t stopped a few, however, from beginning the port of Google’s open mobile OS, Android, to the newest must-have device.
In fact, efforts to port Android's system to the OMAP 3 language (the processor architecture used in the Pre) have been ongoing since July of last year. The biggest hurdles will be accessing the Pre’s low-level system, called the bootloader, to enable switching between its webOS and Android, and finding enough space to do it in Pre’s fixed 8GB of internal storage.